and you thought getting a book deal was hard...

INTERN is back, after a delightful and adventuresome pilgrimage to her ancestral homestead, aka grandma's house, for Thanksgiving. It was nice and low key and most of the crazy belligerent long-lost relatives who cornered INTERN for a chat were too deaf to understand her responses to their questions, so she was able to get away with pretty much anything:

CBLLR: "Why don't you get a real job?"INTERN: "The moon!"

*

An eye-opening thing INTERN learned this week:

Techie Boyfriend, who invented a neat tool a little while ago, and has been staying up late reading about the patent application process. Like book publishing, the whole concept of patenting something can push some powerful emotional buttons: "If I don't get this published/patented, someone can steal my idea!" "If this goes through, I can get rich off the royalties!" "The world really needs my idea!" etc.

With book publishing, you send in your query for the price of postage stamp and it gets read and processed at no further cost to you. Editors and agents and their interns read your pages for free and if your ms gets declined, you're only in the hole emotionally and not financially.

In patenting, though, you pay out the eyeballs for every step of the process. First, there's a $75 fee just to get your application in the door. Then, once your application makes it to the top of the pile, it's another $300 for some monochromatic civil engineering type to read it. Then, it's another couple hundred bucks for somebody at the patent office to search through other patents to make sure your idea hasn't already been taken. Then, the patent folks will probably find something to quibble about in your wording and you'll have to hire a lawyer to fix your patent application for several thousands of dollars.

If you make it that far without a snag, it's another several hundred bones to have the damn patent issued. Oh yeah, and even after the patent is issued, you have to pay a "patent maintenance fee" that starts at $700 and goes up every few years just to keep the rights to your patent.

Sounds an awful lot like a vanity press.

The funny thing is, the U.S. patent office was *supposed* to level the playing field between small-time inventors and big companies, and make it so the big guys couldn't rustle the little guys' ideas. Except now it's prohibitively expensive for most people except in big companies to afford a patent.

So, people, be glad you're only trying to publish books and not trying to patent groovy electronic action figure robots who act out your books. Publishing is at least still *sort of* accessible to everyone. Right? Right? ...

20 or so years ago a friend of mine invented a new speaker system. he had all sorts of compicated schematics of this fantatical new system and was eager to get the thing patented so he could start looking for his new digs on Easy Street.

he found the exact same WFT? walls of impediments, er, i mean paperwork and demands for money that Techie Boyfriend found. my friend came to the conclusion that the process was gamed towards Big Companies in that:

* you, the lowly, poor inventor, comes up with A New Idea

* you, the lowly, poor inventor, patent said New Idea, by investing all of your spare time and money into the process

* then, burdened by the next wave of paperwork and money, you Sell your patent to a Big Company and consider yourself lucky to have gotten out of the process with a few grand.

This is something I think writers do forget. In most other endeavours, it takes a certain amount of capital to get going. Artists need supplies, musicians need instruments, doctors need expensive degrees, etc. But to write, at the most basic level, requires nothing more than pen and paper. And it's something you can do when it suits you. For all there is to bemoan about the book business, there are advantages to it.

Hi Intern: In a previous lifetime I was an intellectual property attorney, though my specialty was trademarks, not patents. I actually worked in the Trademark Office, the cousin to the Patent Office.

Later, when I was with a huge multinational corporation, all my fellow attorneys were engineer/lawyer types who had become patent attorneys -- a livelier bunch would be hard to find. Not.

Indeed, prosecuting a patent does cost a lot -- in time, money, and effort. Those fees are nothing to a corporation, but a lot to an individual. Here's what Techie Boyfriend might want to do:

1) Go to the library or bookstore and find free advice. Maybe it's all online now. There used to be a great book called "Patent It Yourself," and there is often good material from Nolo Press. (Perhaps he's done all this already.)

2) Consider paying for a cheap patent search BEFORE paying out anything at all to the government. So he knows out of the gate if it's dead in the water. (To mix cliches.)

3) Use his techie savvy to make sure it hasn't already been invented -- or if it's what they would call "obvious" -- a combination of already existing technologies which he has simply put together.

4) See if he can find a company who wants to invest in it -- folks who are exploiting such technology already. Perhaps they will think he is a good bet for more such ideas. This is basically selling his idea, but that might not be so bad an option.

Here's the real rub: the patent fees are but the tip of the iceberg. If/when he gets his great idea protected, THEN it is very expensive to get it into production. Prototypes, manufacture, sales, distribution... that's where the expense comes in.

But hey -- my brother is a tech guy who arranges affordable manufacturing overseas and sells to the big companies. Maybe he can help out on that end.

P.S. I finished my now self-help book and just sent the whole ms. out to a big name in literary agents. Thanks for your help!

First, find some rich person (they often call themselves investors). See, rich people get rich by finding people that have invented some neat-o tool, and then they pony up the bucks to get the patent done. And best thing yet? Rich people have lawyers, on retainer!

Now, I think that if we could perhaps get the pulishing industry to work like the patent process in this way...

This article reminds me of the frustration in the patent process that stopped me from trying to market and sell an invention of mine. I have several ideas for some things that I believe are actually worth while, none of this blanket-with-arm-holes crap. (It's called a MONK's ROBE people) ugh.... ok, now I'm on a tangent. What were we talking about?

Sure, it costs money to get a patent. It also costs money to take a vacation or buy a house. And the patent process is indeed full of bureaucracy. But your analogy of how cheap it is to get a book "considered" and your sneer at POD is not warranted. In the patent process, there are specific reasons given for rejection. In publishing, it's all subjective. It's kind of like pornography. An agent claims they know (a good one) when they see it. They ask for things they cannot define, ie "voice." They clutter up the process with jargon. I'd rather spend money than be insulted.

Agree with those who say the two are not analagous. The main reason (as lknick mentioned) is that a technological instrument can be tested for useability (does it work? does it have an application?). This is exactly what (non-scientific) writing cannot be tested for.

Regarding money: the time, the printing, the critique, the research or experience put into the project, the gin, the coffee...these things ain't cheap.

I was a patent examiner before i quit to go back to school to pursue writing so I had to laugh. i was a computer engineer and examined computer security and crypto patents. my husband still works there. so this made me laugh and one of the things you definitely forgot to mention, besides money, is the time. Believe me, once you apply, in my art unit, it took at least 5 years before i looked at a patent application for the first time. then after that, we're talking 6 months at least between responses.

A few things off trademark persons advice:

it's true, whenever i saw a pro se case cross my desk and there was patentable material in the spec but not in the claims, it was hard but i couldn't coach the applicant and it didn't matter that it was in the spec, it has to be in the claim language which is almost always written in legal jargon.

having someone do a search first is only helpful if the person knows what they're looking for. large companies or law firms often have people do searches and they file ids's. do we look at them? yes, but very rarely do we use the art that's in them. because no one knows better than us what we're looking for and we're looking only for what's in the claims.

good luck to techy boyfriend.

also, just as an aside, if he's working for a company right now, he should check the ip rules his company has. for many companies, if your'e working for them, even if you've developed the invention on your own time, it's still theirs. so if he's working for a company, i'd check on that too.

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Hilary T. Smith

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If you've read The Hunger Games (or been in the mute and intensely focused presence of someone in the process of reading it), you know that it's practically impossible to put down. Stephen King compared the book to an arcade game that keeps you helplessly plugging in quarters round after round, and after reading it herself INTERN can say that that's a fair approximation.

What exactly is Suzanne Collins doing, on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph level, that makes this book such a terrifyingly addictive read?

To shed light on this question, INTERN repaired to her secret basement Book Lab, where she soaked a randomly-selected chapter of The Hunger Games in a bath of chemicals designed to reveal the exact function of each sentence.

Oh, and what an exciting experiment it was! Within seconds, the words themselves melted away, leaving only bright colors representing the following things:

Here is what Chapter 12 looks like following the experiment. If you have a copy of …

Greetings from Essaouira, Morocco. Over the past two months, I have mentally composed so many little missives to post here, but somehow they all grew worn and stale before making it online, like letters that seem to wilt the longer they ride around on your car dashboard, waiting for the day you finally stop by the post office to send them. I am at work on Novel 2 and almost completely disconnected from Internet Reality (which is to say from Publishing News Reality, Writing Advice Reality, Author Blog Reality, and yes, Funny Cat Video Reality) but I can feel things collecting in my brain for future sharing here, piling up like snow. A typical day for me right now goes something like this: Wake up. Coffee/Breakfast Write until afternoon. Walk around public gardens while groundskeepers in bright orange vests blow whistles and gesticulate madly for no apparent reason. Develop fever. Hurry home to toss and turn in strangely pleasant delirium. Nip around the corner in search of medicinal oranges; r…

Writing is a job like any other. I
write every day.It's only professional.I write from 4 AM to 7 AM.Writing is a job.
I
didn't write yesterday, or the day before that.

Then
I do the blogging and social media stuff at night.It's only professional.If you don't treat it like a job, you'll
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only—

I don't
have an industrial body. It doesn't shut down at night and start up again in
the morning like it's "supposed" to, clean-faced and ready for
another day's labor. Sometimes, it doesn't shut down for nights and nights, and
I berate it and throw pills at it until it lurches to a diseased kind of
slumber, only to emerge into a diseased kind of waking, howling with hurt and
betrayal like a grizzly bear waking up in a cage.

"Stupid
body," I tell it. "I need you to sleep you so I can wake up so I can
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A few days ago, the Guardian posted this handy guide to decoding publishers' euphemisms at the London Book Fair:We don't have sales numbers yet – trust us, you don't want to know I loved the opening – boy, the middle needs work National publicity and marketing campaign – there's no budget, so you're on your own I've read the book – I've had it read
To which INTERN would like to add:

Queriers' Euphemisms:

This is my first novel:

I have nine other manuscripts in various stages of completeness sitting on my hard drive: three hilariously angsty ones I wrote in highschool, three hilariously pretentious ones I wrote in college, two post-college attempts at science fiction that ran into unsolvable plot snarls somewhere around the Xxordon Galaxy, and a NaNo about two old ladies who sneak around shooting people with poison darts.

This is my first novel that's really, actually ready to query. At least, I think it is. *deep breath*

When you're revising a novel, it's easy to lose objectivity become so delusional you can't tell if you've just created a stinking mountain of goat poop or written the next Grapes of Wrath. Each scene starts to read like a passage in a holy text—or does it just feel that way because you've read it so many times the words are looping through your brain like a mantra?

Fear not! INTERN is here to help. Here's INTERN's handy guide to figuring out when it's time to hit the delete key and write that scene again.

10. The scene is not really a scene.

Your scene is not a scene if nothing has changed by the end of it.Your scene is not a scene if there was no internal or external conflict, no matter how subtle.Your scene is not a scene if you were too timid to let anything dangerous happen.Your scene is not a scene if you were too cautious to let anything unexpected happen.Your scene is not a scene if the reader is banging her head against the wall saying “What wa…

A little while ago, INTERN posted about a fictitious Character Transformation Bazooka which could make characters have deep realisations and catharses instantly, with no justification.

There are a few other weapons of mass manuscript destruction (WMMD) in the arsenal.

One is the Triumph Bomb, or T-Bomb.

If you go see just about any movie that's playing in a mainstream theatre, there's bound to be at least one scene involving a Moment of Triumph: the submarine crew realizes they've fixed their leaking vessel just in time (hugs, shouts, and meaningful apologies ensue) or a pair of starcrossed mental defectives realizes they're meant for each other and triumphantly race to the nearest marriage office.

These moments of triumph usually happen after about ninety minutes of false starts, dissapointments, and disasters.

One comment INTERN finds herself writing frequently in novel critiques is that the moments of triumph in the story come too soon, or make no sense, or seem to dr…

Over the past three years, INTERN has written manuscript
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rolling, and some have not (at least, not yet).
One of the neat things about freelance editing is that you get to be a fly on
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observed some interesting patterns amongst her clientele. Here are some factors
that differentiate the soon-to-be-agented writers from the writers who have a
little further to go. 1. They’ve been at it
for a while.
In INTERN’s experience, the novel that lands the agent is almost never a client’s first manuscript. In fact, the
clients who get in touch with one of those ecstatic “OMG agent!!!” e-mails a
few months down the road have almost
always written two or three other manuscripts, and perhaps even done a
round of querying for one of them before deciding to move on.
See also Querying …

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Months** Friends: publishing is not
all six-book mega-deals and twenty-year olds winning national book awards. Most book deals are small-to-medium, and
most people getting book deals are not teenaged geniuses, contrary to what you read online.

You are valid if you are 20 or 32 or 47 or 64 or 71, if your advance is three hundred bucks or ten thousand, if you are fashionably obscure or completely unknown. The models are Photoshopped. Love, INTERN.

INTERN is feeling extremely wonderful and happy today and wanted to fill the world with yes's instead of no's, do's instead of don'ts. Here, then, are the ten most wonderful and useful things you can do you for your manuscript to give it the best possible chance of growing up big and strong.

1. Revise until there is no "anyway".

The single most common reason that reasonably good manuscripts get turned down (at least, as far as INTERN has observed) is because a writer had an exciting idea, wrote a kinda promising book with a lot of flaws, tried to fix the flaws, gave up, and submitted it anyway.

Never submit it anyway.

"Anyway" is an otherwise promising manuscript's worst enemy. And a manuscript that has been tinkered with until its eyeballs bleed and then submitted anyway screams like a mandrake when pulled out of its envelope. Would you try to fix your car's brakes, get frustrated, and drive it anyway? No? Point made!

Last night, INTERN was chatting with a writer-friend about all things bookish, and they got to talking about agents. How the internet is stuffed with advice about snagging one (always snagging!) but goes curiously silent after the proverbial wedding day, like so many fairy tales. Just like the (presumably awkward) deflowering scene that happens off-stage in those fairytales, there's something the internet doesn't tell you about agents: Having An Agent Is Weird.

Why is having an agent the most awkward thing ever if you've never done it before?

It's a bit like dating your first boy/girlfriend.

If you are the least bit neurotic, you will constantly ask yourself "Do we talk enough? Am I too needy? Too distant? Amy and Brad call each other, like, every hour. Should I fly to NYC to visit him?"

You are the least bit self-doubty, you will wonder, "Does she/he really like me? Does he regret going out with me? Is he just waiting for the right moment to dump me? Is sh…